While some news media were fighting the restrictions on pool
coverage of the war in the Persian Gulf, others were voluntarily
creating their own pools back on the home front.

Milwaukee was one of at least five TV markets where stations
established pool coverage of families reacting to military casualties in
the war.

"We wanted to balance being humane to the families ... with
doing what we thought was journalistically correct, which was to contact
them and give them a chance to speak if they want it," says Fred
D'Ambrosi, news director of WISN-TV (ABC), which was part of a
four-TV station pool in the nation's 28th largest market.

D'Ambrosi says discussion of pools came up as part of the
station's general planning for war coverage. "We weren't
going to badger (families) or do anything that would be perceived as
insensitive," he says, adding, though, that WISN "felt an
obligation to do the story about local casualties."

He called his counterpart at WTMJ-TV with the pool idea, and found
that Channel 4 News Director Tom Luljak was thinking the same thing.

"Our fear was that this could be a very bloody war and that a
lot of people in our area could lose loved ones," Luljak says.

Under the agreement, when word came that someone from the area was
listed as killed, missing in action, or a prisoner of war, one station
contacted the family and, if it got an interview, shared the tape with
the others. Rotation of pool assignments was based on the
station's channel number. Channel 4 (WTMJ-TV) got the first
assignment, followed by Channel 6 (WITI-TV), then Channel 12 (WISN-TV),
then Channel 18 (WVTV-TV).

The pool reporter would not be shown onscreen nor would any
"mike flags" with station logos. All video, including family
photos, were made available to pool members, as well as information
gathered off camera. The audio portion was made available to the radio
counterparts of those TV stations. No other stations in the pool were
to attempt to interview the family until after the funeral, unless
family members sought out media coverage. Friends, neighbors,
schoolmates and others outside the immediate family were fair game for
interviews by all members of the pool.

Pool video could be distributed by pool stations to their networks,
affiliates in the same state, and other stations owned by the same
company as a pool station. However, the rules specifically prohibited
distribution of pool video to so-called "infotainment" shows
without prior notification of families.

"It's a good idea," says a spokesman for Alex
Molnar, co-chair of the Military Families Support Network, which was set
up to provide information and moral support to people with loved ones in
the Gulf. Molnar, a Milwaukee native, had a son in the Gulf.

"I don't think there's any information lost in the
process," if only one reporter interviews a military family rather
than several, Molnar says.

The impetus for the pool arrangement may have been the death of
Scott Schroeder. The 20-year-old Marine from suburban Wauwatosa was
killed January 29th during the battle for Khafji, just south of the
Kuwaiti border with Saudi Arabia. When his parents declined an
interview request, local media went to Wauwatosa East High School,
Scott's alma mater.

Members of a camera crew from Channel 12 were called
"vultures" by some students as they entered the building to
interview the principal. However, while a crew from Channel 4 was
interviewing classmates on a sidewalk in front of the school,
Scott's brother, Skip, 15, approached the reporter and asked to be
interviewed. He told the reporter of his anger at the war and his
brother's death, saying "I wish George Bush felt as bad as I
feel now."

The media have often been criticized for their apparent
insensitivity to families of those killed either in war, plane crashes,
or homicides. However, reporters point out that there are many
occasions, Scott Schroeder's for example, where families readily
consent to an interview or even seek out the media to provide comment.

"My concern is that this (pool coverage) is taken as an
admission that approaching families is bad," says WMTJ-TV reporter
Jeff Fleming.

He's a crime reporter and says "it's not rare"
that a family member willingly consents to an interview. "It
happens enough that I'm obligated to make the effort" to get
an interview, Fleming says.

He also says newspapers reporters often have been as persistent, if
not more so than television reporters, in trying to get comments from
the bereaved, but complains that "TV gets the bad rap."

Fleming's boss, Luljak, shared the concern that the pool might
be an admission on the part of TV news that questioning survivors is
insensitive.

"A lot of people do think that we're vultures, that we
take particular glee in exploiting other people's tragedies to
create good television. Nothing could be further from the truth.

"Anyone who has worked in a television newsroom knows the
agony that reporters and producers go through when they have to make a
call contacting the next of kin about a death," Luljak says.

"We don't have the stomach for what, unfortunately, is a
part of our job (but) somehow we find that stomach."

Pool arrangements were also developed in Seattle, Denver,
Cleveland, and Syracuse, New York.

Dan Cummings, news director of WJXT-TV, the ABC affiliate in
Syracuse, says, "Any grieving family would not have to field eight
or ten phone calls in one afternoon."

He says electronic media in Syracuse created pools before, for the
funeral of a police officer, and a memorial service at Syracuse
University for students killed aboard Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988.

In Denver, KUSA-TV news director Butch Montoya says their pool
developed statewide, including stations in Colorado Springs and a Denver
station's bureau in Grand Junction. In Denver, it included three
network affiliates, an independent, and several radio stations.

What wasn't clear at the war's outset was the quality of
pool reports in competitive markets. The Milwaukee agreement contained
a clause allowing any member to leave the pool at any time.

"What's most important is to maintain the level of
journalistic integrity that we have a reputation for," says
WTMJ's Luljak. "If it ever becomes evident tha the
journalistic quality. . . is no longer possible because of the pool,
then we will walk away from the pool."

Even after the war's end, however, pools remained in place in
four of the five markets. Station officials in each market reported the
arrangement worked well. The pool arrangements in Syracuse was dropped
because the only known casualty from the area had been reported prior to
the pool arrangement.

Robert Mullins is a freelance writer based in the Milwaukee area.

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